80.7 kg


That's down half a kg from last week. w00t!

I'm pretty happy with that in spite of not eating or sleeping this last week as great as I should have done:

Monday was good.
But Tuesday I drove to work and ate junk to stay awake in the car.
Wednesday I also drove to work and also ate some junk (but less than Tuesday) to stay awake in the car, but had an apple on the way back which worked fine.
Thursday was fine, until I got home and we had pizza, garlic bread, and gelato for dinner.
And Friday was also fine during the day, but then I had gelato that night too.

I've had worse weeks in terms of food and sleep, so half a kg is pretty good.

I want it below 80 by next Saturday.

My department has been working on a report for the last couple of months that was released to the media yesterday as part of Anglicare's Christmas appeal launch. It's the first time that I have ever written something for the public, and even though very few people outside of the industry will read it, it was still kind of cool to have something out there that was covered in the news for a fleeting moment.

The report was an update on a larger report my co-workers put together in June. It was an analysis of trends among people who access emergency relief services from Anglicare - the kind of help that comes in the form of emergency financial assistance for people who are really struggling to pay bills and buy food. The previous report identified that

- single mothers
- indigenous people
- people in public housing
- people who lived alone

were massively overrepresented.

It also called for a better emergency relief model. Many single mothers, indigenous people, single person households and people in public housing struggle with many other social and financial issues that can't be addressed by giving them a food hamper or paying off an occasional electricity bill. The government currently only funds organisations like Anglicare for this kind of assistance. When emergency relief staff spend time helping people negotiate centrelink or helping people access counselling services, parenting classes, drug and alcohol programs, budgeting classes or anything that isn't a financial transaction, the organisation has to subsidise it themselves.

Our update happened because we got an extra 5 months of data which helped us see how the global financial crisis impacted on these people. Firstly, there were more of them. The demand for services increased, although we couldn't actually help many more people because we were already operating at capacity. The same sorts of people were accessing services but, they were coming with different problems. Many many more people were coming because they were having trouble securing housing, and many many more were presenting with unemployment.

If you want to check out the report, you can find it here.

If you are more of a visual person, you can look at the wordle instead:




So yesterday, the report was made public, there were media releases and the report was covered by both Fairfax and News Limited with an identical story, although different headlines. I'm not sure how that works. This is my first experience like this, but somehow I wasn't surprised when the reports were dramatically incorrect. I am never complaining about poor journalism in the Sydney Anglican newspaper ever again. It has nothing on this. They just copied and pasted extracts of the Anglicare media release, and then got creative. They changed 'increased' to 'rocketed' and pulled out the biggest stats they could find from the media release. They also made up something about increasing requests for counselling and family services, even though (as I just mentioned) the only data we had was for people coming to financial assistance, and the media release was pretty straightforward about that. It's making me suspicious of most of what I have ever read in the newspapers.

81.2 kg


So that's an increase of .1 kg. It's not much, but it's not a decrease this week. Damn.

I think it all comes down to sleep. If I get decent sleep, then I'm not tired during the days and I'm not tempted to eat junk food and sugar stuff to stay awake.

I must work on the sleep next week.

I didn't really care about the Melb Cup, or do anything fun, cos the weather was windy and terrible.. i didnt even pay attention to the race on the tv at the dvd store.. but i did put on my new $5 op shop frock and take pics of myself.. lol.

I was off work sick yesterday with a headache exacerbated by allergies. In the morning it was a relief to stay home, but by the afternoon I was missing it and ready to go back.

Despite previously mentioned struggles with writing, I really love my job. I'm feeling it today when the writing has cultimated in completed reports. Two of them have reached some kind of end point today. The first one has been sent off to its stakeholders for review, and the second one is being beautified for public consumption. It feel so great when you can look over completed documents and think: here is the fruit of my labour.

Now that the writing is done, I have returned to GIS to fix up a series of maps so they are pretty enough for presentation. It's nice to be on this software again, there hasn't been any significant project work that required maps for a couple of weeks. But it's taking an awfully long time for everything to load, which is bad news for my fingernails. At times like this, I just sit and gnaw at them absent-mindedly as I wait for the screen to load. So it seems a bit more fruitful now to open up notepad and work at an entry. My fingernails are grateful.

Being a researcher and GIS-pro is fantastic, and it's nice to reflect on all the ways that God has prepared me for this through uni, and my personal interests, and the people who have influenced me. But there are some other dream jobs that I also wouldn't mind having if I had the right skills and I didn't have to go through even more training at TAFE or uni.

I love growing things, and I would love to have an outdoorsy job, like a landscape gardener or a conservationist job with National Parks and Wildlife services. Unfortunately, I have heard stories of the enourmous amount of work that my brother-in-law does as a greenkeeper and I'm sure that I don't have the stamina for it. So my compromise is to wish that I had a more promising green thumb and a little bit of earth (like in The Secret Garden) to grow my own things.

I love making things look nice, and I would love to be some kind of graphic designer. It would be amazing to understand how colour works, and to be a little bit aesthetically sensitive. But I have realised that although I can appreciate things that look good, and I can sharpen up things so they look a bit better, I don't have the streak of creativity that's needed to create things from scratch. So I guess for the time being I will enjoy making things look good in the capacity I have: making maps and charts at work and making icons at home.

I love the adrenelin of the stage, and I would love to have a job being a part of it in any way - a musician, a set designer, a sound engineer, a director, a stage hand. As long as it was in the background. I have a big problem with nerves! But where do I even start getting skill sets like these?! And the contacts that I'd need to find a job! And similarly to my problem with being a designer - I lack the particular type of creativity that's needed here. I'll be content then with my mum buying me ballet subscriptions (she is fantastic) and trips to see chamber orchestras and gigs and musicals and dance classes at the Sydney Dance Company. Those things are awesome fun in themselves anyway.

I love helping people understand more about who Jesus is, and I would love to do that all the time. The thing is, I already strive to do it all the time. The question I'm only now beginning to ask myself is: Do I personally want to actually do that as a job? (Am I already doing that working for Anglicare?)

For the time being, I am so happy here at Anglicare. I love that my hobbies are my hobbies, and my work is my work, and striving to serve Jesus and the church and his world is a permanent reality that pervades it all. Yeah, I think that is what I have arrived at, and it is good.